Preface

Summary

THIS BOOK was sparked by three experiences, two academic and one intensely personal. In the winter of 1989, while on sabbatical from my home institution, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, I had the privilege of serving the first of two stints as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. Peter Novick's book That Noble Dream had just appeared and it eloquently articulated the crisis of identity and confidence that postmodern mores had caused in the historical profession. Spending that semester in Ann Arbor listening to lectures, participating in discussions, and reading material that reflected this crisis set me on a path to attempt to understand the ramifications of postmodernism for my own subspecialty of history, Jewish history. One result of this was a new graduate course I began teaching at Bar-Ilan entitled ‘Methods and Topics in Historiography’, which became the vehicle by which I could explore the relationship between historiography and postmodernism, and allowed me to hone my own ideas against the lively arguments of my students.

The second academic experience was a conference held at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley in the early summer of 1997. This was a gathering of all of the scheduled authors of the collective work Cultures of the Jews: A New History, under the virtuoso leadership of its editor, David Biale. The discussions with colleagues at this, my first conference in Berkeley, led to a revelation: on every parameter (intellectual, cultural, religious, and so on) I was at the right end of the spectrum. Having fancied myself a liberal for all of my sentient life, the discovery that, at least in relative terms, I was a conservative was disconcerting. This discovery did, however, help me understand my reaction to postmodernism and showed me how I might go about formulating a position. At the Berkeley conference, I appreciated the fact that at least some of those who disagreed with me were willing to engage with my views, and I think it is fair to say that the rational discourse held there, and subsequently by email, influenced thinking and even changed positions on both sides of the divide.